Nobody puts Baby in a corner, as Dirty Dancing taught us, but when it comes to cartography, stuff gets relegated to the corner of the map all the time. During the Age of Exploration, map corners were often filled with engravings of sea monsters. In the 1980s, comedian Rich Hall included "hawaska" among the invented words in his Sniglets books. "Hawaska" is not a psychotropic drug from the Amazon; Hall coined it to mean "that rectangular box which contains Hawaii and Alaska, and is located just off the coast of Arizona." For decades, Scotland has had its own controversial equivalent of the familiar "hawaska" box. And as of this month, it's prohibited by law.

This Scottish island group is a real dog and pony show.

There are more than 100 islands in the Shetland archipelago, many of which have the colorful, Game of Thrones-style names you'd expect: Yell, Unst, Fetlar, Whalsay. More than 20,000 people live on the Shetlands' bleak, subarctic terrain, and they mostly make their living on fishing boats, sheep farms, and offshore oil and gas platforms. But the most famous residents probably aren't human at all: They're the island's beloved animal breeds. Tiny, muscular Shetland ponies and fuzzy Shetland sheepdogs ("Shelties") are known the world over.

Great Britain ends at the Shetlands.

But it's the Shetland humans who are up in arms over their islands' second-class status. The windswept Shetlands lie less than 400 miles from the Arctic Circle, and their outermost isle, an uninhabited rocky outcrop called Out Stack, is the northernmost point of Britain. Just to the south is Muckle Flugga, Britain's northernmost lighthouse, and also its most delightfully named one. There are places in Alaska, the Yukon, and Greenland that are farther south than Out Stack and Muckle Flugga.

The Shetlands fight a conspiracy of cartographers.

The Shetlands are so far north that a 50-mile channel separates them from the other archipelago in the Northern Isles, the Orkneys. For cartographic convenience, maps of Scotland usually end at the Orkneys, and include the Shetlands in a little corner box. This mis-location has apparently irked Shetlanders for some time, and back in May, their Member of Parliament, Tavish Scott, proposed a law that would ban the "intensely annoying" practice on maps.

One hundred islands get their own "unboxing" video.

Scott's "Shetland mapping amendment" passed unanimously and so, as of last week, public bodies in the U.K. must include vast swaths of sea in their maps of Scotland, in order to put the Shetlands in the right place. This will be a sweeping change—even some Scottish banknotes currently use an inset box. But the new law does include an out for mapmakers: They can still box the Shetlands as long as they explain why they had to do it. Alaska and Hawaii: Are you tired of atlases constantly placing you in the Mexican desert? Contact your senators!

Explore the world's oddities every week with Ken Jennings, and check out his book Maphead for more geography trivia.